The Big Chill in the Eastern Mediterranean

Brian Ulrich alerted me to this:

The Big Chill and the Eastern Mediterranean

Among the solid contributions to Middle Eastern environmental history which have come out the past couple of years is Ronnie Ellenblum's The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072.  Its topic is the effects on the eastern Mediterranean of the protracted period of cold spells which Richard Bulliet termed the "Big Chill," and which was part of the global climate shift which also gave rise to the Medieval Warm Period in the North Atlantic which is well known to historians of medieval Europe.  Ellenblum convincingly ties enough major developments into the "Big Chill" that it deserves to be considered a major watershed in the region's history.

What are these developments?  One is the rise of nomadic powers, such as the Seljuqs in the Middle East, the Pechenegs in the Byzantine Empire, and the Banu Hilal in North Africa.  Multiple dynasties fell or were weakened with the collapse of bureaucracies and the agrarian base to sustain organized military power.  Major cities witnessed a decline in their population and infrastructure, marking the sharp final decline of the urban life developed in the region during the Hellenistic period.  Finally, population shifts, both in-migration and out-migration, led to religious change as Muslim nomads took the place of Christian peasants in agriculturally marginal regions.

Some will probably accuse Ellenblum of environmental determinism, but this is not his argument.  In his own words:

Civilizations are altered and transformed by calamities, although they usually succeed in finding, when the crisis is over, ways to reconstruct new stable societal structures and a new equilibrium that resemble, to a certain degree, the pre-calamity social order. Differences between pre- and post-calamity cultures, however, are often discerned.

In other words, in periods of environmental catastrophe, people adapt in a variety of ways, and even when the catastrophe is over, those ways continue to exist and leave their own historical legacies, whether in demographic shifts, institutions, or settlement structures.

Sounds interesting!

Image:  Snow in Damascus, January 2013

Climate-change disaster and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver

I am going to confess to a common fault. If things are bad enough, I just don't want to think about them, certainly not in any detail. And, as someone remarked at my dinner table two nights ago, things are pretty yucky right now.

The worst thing happening right now, if not the closest, is that climate change seems to be destroying an entire country, and not in a matter of years or decades, but in a matter of weeks or months. One commentator said about the Pakistan situation, "Where are the rock stars?"  For that matter, where are the Saudi princes?

Instead of talking about that, at least the moment, let me reflect on the skill and eloquence of that amazing writer, Neal Stephenson. I am reading his novel Quicksilver, and it has led me to reflect that some people will do a certain amount of research and write a course on early modern Europe, while someone else will to about the same amount of research and write something approaching  a masterpiece of historical fiction.

Here is Stephenson portraying a former harem slave speaking to William of Orange on a beach in Holland in 1685:

"In a way, a slave is fortunate, because she has more head-room for her dreams and phant'sies, which can soar to dizzying heights without bumping up 'gainst the ceiling. The ones who live at Versailles are as high as humans can get, they practically have to about stooped over because their wigs and headdresses are scraping the vault of heaven -- which consequently seems low and mean to them. When they look up, they see, not a vast beckoning space above, rather --"

[William]"The gaudy painted ceiling."

"Just so. You see? There is no head-room. And so for one who has just come from Versailles, it is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little, and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes."

Comments welcome!

Image:  Amsterdam.